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[Seupsut]

 So I started to dig this shaft downwards, 3x3. All was going fine for a few levels when I decided to start digging off from this shaft in order to tap into the bottom of a pond/lake. My miners went to work hollowing out the to-be farm but once they finished this work they just kept running around under ground. It's been a while and they're on the verge of starving/dehydrating. They absolutely refuse to go back up those stairs. I've made sure that there are stairs leading up/down. I even tried getting them to dig their way up via a new route but I think they're too far gone to do anything.

No other dwarves seem interested in climbing down those stairs in order to clear away the ore left behind by my two brave diggers either. So what is it that's keeping them from traveling those stairs. This is the second game in a row where this has happened in much the same fashion.

Thanks for helping this lowly newb out.

[Corona688]

Try building a wall down there, see what materials are available.  You might've dug out one of your up stairs or knocked too many walls away from a ramp or something.  Also try saving and reloading to see if that fixes pathfinding.

Also, they're not starving until they're hunting vermin, remember they don't give up work at the drop of a hat in this version.

[Seupsut]

They're already at the vermin hunting phase (took me a while to realize they were missing). I tried saving and reloading but they're still there and I've only dug one path away from my main shaft so the other stairs should still be accessible (I've watched one walk over a few different stair icons yet still not walk up them).

The layout of my shaft (man that sounds dirty) is as follows:

XXX
XXX=======
XXX
(oh man, that doesn't make it look any better)

X: Up/down stairways
=: The hallway leading off from the stairs

[Corona688]

Have you tried building a wall down there to see what materials are available yet?

[Seupsut]

I have. There's rock salt and olivine, that's it.

I tried rebuilding the stairs leading down to that level and assigning another dwarf to dig but the only two pix axes were on the starving dwaves. Not sure if you can dig bare handed or not, but the new miners just sat around doing nothing as well.

[Lord Darkstar]

If your miners are starving, you can do a few things.

Option 1) create a small food stockpile down in the tunnel, and see if your dwarves can carry food down to it. If they can, you have full up/down pathing on the shaft, and hopefully your stuck miners should be able to access the food stockpile.

Option 2) draft your miners into your militia. Set their alert level to anything other than inactive. Station them on the stairs. If they get that far, keep moving the miners station back to your main fortress area. Once you've worked them back, set their squad's alert level to inactive. Miners are home. (This presumes you are using 0.31.x--- but making them a squad and activating and then stationing them will work in 0.28.x as well--- just less steps involved).

In 31.x, the game sometimes screws up its pathing cache. To fix that, normally all you have to do is save the game, exit the game, and then restart the game. That resets the cache.

The other thing that happens is that the burrows get screwed up for civilians. When that happens, you have to manually remove them from the burrow listing to get them to run around everywhere on the map once this occurs.

[Seupsut]

Sweet, thanks for your help with this. In the end I just wound up abandoning the fortress, but I have a few new things to try if it happens again. And it may sound weird but I really love the whole new world generation process, so it's win-win.